Indeed – Scrum by the book indicates there’s no project management role. The Scrum master protects the team from outside interference. Any stakeholder must speak to the product owner regarding any type of product “requirement” or “desire”.

In traditionally structured organisation, I see a lot of project overhead: programme managers, end-2-end project managers, IT delivery managers, team managers (business, business acceptance testing, IT acceptance testing, engineering …), project officers. This is typical for a ‘command & control’ structure, with mostly symptoms such as inefficient and unclear communications, re-communications, re-work, etc.

Project managers probably don’t become product owners very often, unless that person has extensive business knowledge and has the right attitude to be occupied with defining the WHAT (and not the HOW).

It’s a fact a number of items have to be taken care in order for a team to have a swift start (e.g. team composition, resource allocation, facilities, etc.). According to me, a Scrum master could handle these items, before the start of the 1st sprint (or during the 1st sprint in terms of logistics).

Among the tasks, the Scrum master certainly is occupied with “the bigger picture”, such as keeping in touch with stakeholders on a regular basis; help the team to report to management; being a contact person for everyone in the team and their stakeholders regarding Agile, etc. You don’t need to keep an end-2-end project manager to handle these tasks.

In the list “Role of a Project Manager”, I do not agree with:

•Manages all aspects of project –The project manager is the captain of the project and he provides end to end support from start to end > Well, if you say so. It does sound a lot like a project manager who wants to be in control and micro-manage. I don’t see the need.

•Does Goal setting – The Project Manager needs to understand outcomes and ensures that they are measurable and realistic > the team with the product owner is setting the goal on a sprint level

•Encourages ‘Team Bonding’ – As the master of the entire project, the Project manager ensures that his team is well collaborated and defines the work by understanding their capabilities > this can be a task for the Scrum master

•Is the Focal point – Finally, the project manager is the single point of contact for sharing and communicating any information related to the project and thus has an important role to play > again this can be a task for the Scrum master

According me a setup could be:

An agile team of multiple agile teams, working on the same or multiple products -If the teams are working on the same product, there is 1 common product backlog.

The backlog can be managed on a ‘programme’ level (high-level epics/features), is grouped according to feature-set and becomes more fine-grained on a ‘product’ level.

There are some videos available giving insights into agile and agile frameworks, see below a collection – if you have any suggestions for other, please leave a comment! (some of these videos are by commercial vendors, but I only include these if indeed the video is instructive)